The Housing Crisis is a Real Estate Game

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2021-07-17 13:30:05

While Toronto’s housing crisis deepens, investors are playing the real estate game. Using land and buildings as a means to extract profits, the game enriches some while it impoverishes others. Its rules deepen class divides, erase Indigenous treaties, perpetuate racialized systems of inequality, and maintain precarious territory.

Encampments may be the most visible manifestation of Toronto’s housing crisis, the consequences of the real estate game in plain sight, built into the landscape. This map draws on local examples to illustrate the complex and interconnected issues that comprise Toronto’s housing crisis and the movements working to change it.

Illustrated by Daniel Rotsztain. Web coding by @clawtros. Content through ESN Explainers (explain.it.esn@gmail.com)

47% of the City of Toronto’s residential neighbourhoods (an area known as the ‘Yellowbelt’) are subject to exclusionary or hierarchical zoning policy that effectively prevents new apartment buildings from being built. This policy imposes restrictions on building height and housing type, and requires that any new buildings stay true to the ‘neighbourhood character,’ essentially limiting construction to single- and semi-detached houses that typically sell for well over one million dollars. As a result, the Yellowbelt lacks high- and low-rise purpose-built rental buildings.